Reisig and Taylor
Stahl, 2018
Lenticular Assemblage
20 x 40 in
While the surface of popular culture is most often marked with the faces of celebrity figures and the insignia of iconic commodities, Stahl Case Study House #22 revels in the architectural, physical identity of mid-century modern design in Los Angeles. Populated by the hyper-individualized—but indifferently reproduced—forms of the ever-familiar Barbie, the work distributes itself in the friction between the facelessness of the mass media (and mass cultural production) and the accelerated aesthetic functioning of individual identity in Pop Art, and popular culture in general. Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House is the archetype of modern architecture, and Barbie is the eidolon of modern corporeality: the Vitruvian proportions of the plastic bodies and the space they occupy is a blueprint for modernism in the United States.